ArcGIS is an incredibly powerful software suite. It has
become an indispensable tool for geographers and policy makers, but has the
potential to be used in a number of fields. This particular tutorial would have
been useful for an urban planning commission deciding on whether or not to
grant a permit to expand the airport. By using ArcGIS to create maps displaying
the geographic areas that would be most affected by an expansion within the
noise contour, questions about whether or not an expansion would be advisable
can be answered.
As demonstrated
in this tutorial, ArcGIS allows for users to display and represent geospatial
data from multiple layers and through relations. In one of the exercises it was
necessary to join data from two tables where one outlined the census tract data
and the other had population density data. I liked how easy it was to perform a
join in ArcGIS, as this can be a really frustrating thing to do correctly in
some relational database management software packages. Being able to do this
within the program itself rather than requiring the user to manage their data
through an outside database is definitely a plus for user friendliness. I also
found the way it allows the user to customize their maps and enhance
presentation to be very intuitive. In this exercise we used pre-designated
styles, but for someone working on a personal project they have hundreds of
options. Multiple maps can be created, arranged, formatted, and presented in
ways that fit all kinds of different contexts without needing to utilize an
outside graphic design suite.
Despite the
user friendliness of database manipulation and built in abilities to enhance
presentation, ArcGIS has a steep learning curve. In this tutorial I found
myself running into problems every twenty minutes or so. The first problem I
ran into dealt with maintaining scale between the data and layout views. I
eventually realized I could change it in the toolbar at the top and pan, but
initially it just wasn’t working for me. I also closed the table of contents at
one point and it took me ten minutes to figure out how to retrieve it. The most
frustrating experience however dealt with the exercise in which we were asked
to expand the street route going through the airport. I hit something that
deleted the arterials_new layer from the table of contents and couldn’t figure
out how to bring it up again. After taking a break however I remembered that it
had been saved as a data source within the geodatabase.
For the
general public, the usefulness of ArcGIS compared to neogeography tools depends
on the questions being asked. ArcGIS isn’t very useful for people who are
simply trying to show their friends their favorite surf breaks, taco shops, or
other specific geographic locales like these. Simply put, the amount of work that
would go into creating a map like this would be excessive. If one were however
trying to show the effect of a broader phenomenon upon a general area or
population, using ArcGIS would be ideal.
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